The 'Dating App' That Helps Teachers Find A Best-Fit School

Education
I write on school systems, school choice and teacher professionalism.

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After two years of teaching pre-kindergarten, Cristina Guadalupe was ready to transition to the elementary level. Dedicated to working with low-income students, she began applying to schools in underserved communities across Camden, New Jersey. She sent out application after application but heard nothing back.

“Each application took me hours to complete, and I couldn’t even be sure someone read it. It was getting hard to stay hopeful,” she says.

Teachers fill out a profile where they relay their qualifications and experience. Then, they answer questions about desired school culture and pedagogical preferences.

These questions ask about instructional models, discipline, classroom systems, and curriculum. For example, do you prefer inquiry-based learning or direct instruction? Should curriculum be teacher-created or school-provided?Should student discipline procedures have roots in a primarily restorative justice or a “no excuses” approach?

Schools fill out a similar profile, providing basic information (location, school type, grades served, staff and student demographics, etc.), a description of what makes them unique, a fun fact and a sketch of their ideal candidate. Schools also answer questions about their culture and pedagogy.

Selected then uses algorithms similar to those used by dating apps to match a teacher with best-fit schools. The schools receive a list of candidates who meet their staffing requirements, and those teachers who are the best “cultural fits” appear at the top of the list.

Tam explains that Selected is designed not only to create a streamlined hiring process for teachers but also to help them find a best-fit school. The service is always free for teachers, and schools and districts only pay once they hire a candidate who they found through the platform. On average, five compatible schools contact a candidate within the first week.

“On Selected, I filled out one application, described my ideal working environment and within two days I received a message from the director of ECO [Environment Community Opportunity] public charter school, asking me if I’d like to come in for an interview” says Guadalupe, who now teaches first grade at ECO.

“Schools were able to see right away that I didn’t have experience at the elementary level, which meant that the ones that connected with me knew that I’m still at a phase of my career where I need mentorship,” says Guadalupe.

That wasn’t an issue for ECO. The school has a strong mentorship program for teachers in their early years and a pipeline of professional development specifically targeted at helping teachers with less experience achieve success.

“ECO is a school where I’m a good fit,” says Guadalupe. “It’s a small school with a tight sense of community, and the leaders focus on the whole child. We don’t use only test scores to determine how well a child is doing. I believe in holistic teaching, and the rest of the faculty does too. We all have the same vision for success.”

“Looking for a job is like dating,” says Tam. “With dating, you have to meet a lot of people to see what you like. With job searching, you need to see the breadth and the diversity of workplaces available to know where you’ll fit.

We found that unlike other professionals, teachers didn’t have means to easily access that information. We wanted to create that for them.”

Making Autonomous Schools Visible

When researching and developing Selected, Tam and his team talked with school leaders, district representatives, and teachers.

Tam discovered that many large urban school districts don’t feel pressured to actively recruit top-quality talent. “A lot of district representatives that we spoke with had this monopoly-like attitude, essentially saying, ‘Why bother? Where else are teachers going to apply?’” says Tam. “So early on, we partnered mostly with public charter schools because they were responsive to trying Selected in a way that most districts weren’t.”

Charter schools are public schools operated by independent organizations, usually nonprofits. Most are schools of choice, and unlike magnet schools in traditional districts, they are not allowed to select their students. Freed from many rules and top-down policies constraining district-operated schools, charter school leaders have direct control over most school-level decisions. In exchange for increased autonomy, they are normally held accountable for their performance by their authorizers, who can close or replace them if their students aren’t learning enough.

While many principals at district-operated schools must choose teachers based on whoever’s next on the district-approved hiring list, charter school leaders can be selective about the teachers they hire. Yet, Tam and his team found that public charter schools often struggle to make themselves discoverable to teachers. They usually don’t have the money for headhunters or widespread advertising. They lack the manpower of a human resources department, and school leaders spend hours shifting through low-quality resumes, looking for top-quality candidates. Many rely on job board postings, a strategy known among these leaders as “post and pray.”

“Individual charters needed visibility, and the lack of centralization made them easier to work with,” Tam says. “The school leaders were willing to be innovative about hiring, and they had the autonomy to do it.”

David Rosas is the head of Heketi Charter School, a dual-language immersion school in the South Bronx. Prior to finding Selected, Rosas went to job fairs and attempted to recruit teachers.

“I’d be in the middle of talking to a candidate, and then they’d realize we’re located deep in the South Bronx, and the person either didn’t want to travel out there or didn’t want to work with our kids. I wanted to find people who want to teach in the Bronx. I didn’t want to have to convince someone to take a job at our school; that’s insulting to our kids,” he says.

Rosas now uses Selected as his main recruitment tool. It’s productive because he can see which candidates fit in culturally with the school and then start a conversation to see if they’re a good fit in other areas, too. Rosas seeks teachers who want to become imbedded in the community and whose pedagogical beliefs are rooted in positive discipline as well as recognizing the humanity of each child.

“There’s a lot of stereotypes about who goes to school in the South Bronx,” says Rosas. “We want to make sure those stereotypes don’t influence how our educators engage with families, the community, and each other. The warmth of our school comes from the staff trusting and respecting all members of the community. We’re very protective of that warmth.”

Through Selected, Heteki has found teachers, a current school leader, and a reading specialist. So far, all have been successful placements.

Creating A Teacher-Centric Approach To Hiring

However, many teachers don’t realize that employment opportunities outside their district, like working in public charter schools, exist.

“Despite having some of the most unique teaching and learning environments in the country, individual public charter schools have been in a tough recruitment spot when compared with districts or large CMOs [charter management organizations],” says Tam. “A lot of teachers don’t even realize that charter schools are public schools, and they certainly aren’t aware of the variety of learning models that these schools offer.”

Because charters are schools of choice and their leaders have the autonomy to set school culture and curriculum, they often utilize unique learning models – Montessori, project-based, dual-language, residential, etc. Being able to choose from a variety of learning models increases the ability of teachers to find a best-fit school.

“For a lot of teachers, there’s an air of desperation when job changing, and many places take advantage of that by making teachers feel like they only have one option and that they’d better take the offer before it expires,” Tam says. “Teachers make suboptimal choices about where to work because they don’t think they have the time or know-how to find a best-fit school.”

Some teachers told Tam that they had stayed at schools where they were unhappy because the springtime hiring window overlaps with the timeframe for contract renewal, and they feared they might not get a different placement.

“These were quality teachers,” says Tam. “It was amazing that they didn’t see themselves as a scarce resource. I thought, ‘we need to find a way to put quality teachers into schools where they’re happy before they leave teaching altogether.’ Schools needed to be approaching these teachers, not the other way around.”

“Honestly, it was just luck that I came across Selected online,” says Zenon Mills, a special education teacher at Monument Academy Public Charter School in Washington, D.C. Mills had recently finished his teacher training outside of downtown Chicago, and he was looking for a job in the District. “I used Selected concurrently with the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) application process,” Mills says. “Selected was easy and intuitive; the DCPS system was exhausting.”

Monument Academy is a weekday boarding school that serves students who have experienced trauma at home, especially those who are currently in, or at risk of being placed in, foster care. As part of his teacher training, Mills taught at a residential therapeutic school.Many of that school’s students were sent there in lieu of jail sentences, and Mills felt that Monument’s focus on a student’s ability to grow mirrored his values as well as those of his previous school.

“Selected let me list what I wanted in a school, and I think that helped guide Monument’s choice in me,” says Mills. “I fit in really well with the culture because the school focuses on what I think are the important issues around students’ well-being. There’s also a lot of support in terms of professional growth, which I like. I get observed every three weeks or so.”

Monument hired Mills over a full month before DCPS entered him into its “preferred teachers pool,” which is the part of the hiring process when principals can contact candidates.

According to Tam, that’s not uncommon. “Many of our single-site schools contact candidates quickly, and they aren’t required to go through a central system first,” Tam explains. “Human resources representatives at a central office often take a lot longer to respond to a candidate than an eager principal would. We had one district tell us that our candidates weren’t responsive, but when we looked at our data, we found that our candidates had accepted other job offers in the time that it took for that district’s central office to make initial contact.”

However, Tam has worked with some forward-thinking principals at district schools. These principals create accounts on Selected, find a best-fit teacher, and then instruct that person to apply to the district. It’s a creative strategy, but it still forces teaching candidates to go through an extra layer of bureaucracy.

“It’s not that there aren’t unique school models within districts – there absolutely are – but they’re often a part of a highly centralized hiring process,” says Tam.

Districts that continue to rely on such a hiring process baffle Tam. “The hiring process is the first aspect of a future work environment that a potential employee experiences,” he says. “It influences your reputation as an employer. With a good recruitment process, people will say, ‘This place chases quality. They value teachers and treat them with respect.’ And that builds a pipeline for recruiting future talent. Shouldn’t every district and school want to make a good first impression?”

Selected now partners with over 650 schools across urban areas in seven states, and it’s beginning to partner with more districts, too. Unfortunately, many districts do have a highly centralized hiring process. In these districts, the central office hiring team uses Selected as a way of finding high-quality candidates for the district pool rather than focusing on finding a best-fit teacher for each school.

While Selected is an innovative tool for recruiting best-fit teachers, it’s not a substitute for organizational change. After all, utilizing Selected has been the most beneficial to teachers and schools when principals have had control over staffing decisions. School districts need to give their principals the same hiring autonomy granted to those at charter schools so that all public schools leaders have the ability to find teachers who best fit the needs of their school and, by extension, the needs of their students.

I'm the policy analyst for the Reinventing America's Schools project at The Progressive Policy Institute. After graduating from James Madison University, I earned a Master of Philosophy in Literature from Trinity College Dublin. After living in Ireland, I taught English as a...